


Yellow

by counterheist



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Cyberpunk, F/M, Genderbending, Significantly Capitalized Words, puns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-30
Updated: 2011-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-29 11:28:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where the dead can come back to life via technological advancements, Belle Mertens faces life with a smile and Vash Zwingli is grudgingly in love with his best friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yellow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glory_of_hera](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=glory_of_hera).



> a very belated [help_japan](http://help-japan.livejournal.com/profile) fic for [glory_of_hera](http://glory-of-hera.livejournal.com/profile)! A little world building turned into a lot of world building, accidentally, so this also belongs in a universe of fics that have yet to be written.

The one place in Schengen where time stood still was in the ARTIST’s district, and that was only because the district was more of a series of fancy warehouses than a real part of the city.

In the white warehouses, painted for purity and beginnings, and vandalized on a weekly basis, the newest batches of ARTISTs waited for life to seep into their neural circuitry and race up through their blood vessels and into their guaranteed 100% organic hearts. The white warehouses were very clean, rather small, and quiet on the inside. The diehard protestors sent up their furies and shouts outside the freshly-painted gates every Saturday at half-past noon, but even those angry masses had dwindled since the first days.

It had only been ten years since the original ARTIST had been produced. Yet, even in that short amount of time, regular humanity had collectively decided that the horror of a biosynthetic human being was an acceptable evil when that biosynthetic human being wasn’t some dull android or unfathomable Synthetic Intelligence. When the fakeness wore the mask, and the _memories_ , of someone you had loved… no one could blame anyone else for seizing a second chance.

And the beauty of it was that ARTISTs could never stage a robot uprising ( _as the half-past-nooners feared_ ), because they were:

(1) mostly organic, blood and bone, and robots were cliquey at best; they would never assist an ARTIST takeover, and

(2) tied to the lifespan of the person they had replaced. They lived, they aged, and they died.

No publication explained the phenomenon well enough for anyone to understand. Those few scientists who said they did were, without exception, believed by the general populace to be pretending. The creator of the ARTISTS refused to say any more on the matter, and the Bonnefoy Institute ignored every attempt to force him to speak.

But those things, one and two, weren’t important. However it happened, whatever science or magic or miracle that made it possible, ARTISTs weren’t just supercomputer brains housed in artificially grown bodies. They were alive.

They could laugh.

They could love.

They could die again.

The pale blue warehouses held the medical centers that repaired both flesh and the stray bits of wiring and software that sometimes came unaligned.

The green warehouses held the research facilities and the heavily-protected extraction ward. Not even the half-past-nooners dared to throw rocks at the windows or spray-paint threats on the walls of the Greens. Every day, bodies entered the extraction ward, and small boxes exited through the very same doors several hours later. The rest of the original was respectfully burned. Families never wanted the return of the body of someone who would soon no longer be dead. That dismissal trickled back down through the staff of the Greens, no matter how much the Institute administrators tried to discourage it. Calling a body a ‘husk’ was a second-level behavioral offense, but it happened anyway.

Most workers were too enthralled with what was happening on the other side of the Greens, and what was being sent, quietly, to the Whites, to really care about a slap on the wrist or four. Every ARTIST began in the extraction ward. Who would pay more attention to an ending over a beginning?

The yellow warehouse, and there was just the one, the single sprawling one, sat on the back edge of the Bonnefoy Institute compound. The Greens weren’t even visible from its door, although the smoke rising from them was, and occasionally ARTISTs would stop and watch it twist before being bundled back inside again.

The workers at Yellow tended to dislike their colleagues in the extraction ward, on principle. In the extraction ward, life was a secret. Life was a box. Life was a 100% guaranteed organic heartbeat.

Inside the yellow warehouse, ARTISTs learned that living was very different from merely being alive.

Belle Mertens, with her yellow sundress and dirty grey tennis shoes, liked being the one to teach those lessons. She wasn’t technically a researcher, or even a teacher: the ARTISTs had both of those at Yellow as well. Belle Mertens was an attendant.

She assisted the fresh ARTISTs who had yet to acclimatize to being alive ( _again_ ), prepared the ARTISTs who would soon leave for the outside world, and befriended the ARTISTs who, somewhere along the line, had failed.

Some souls didn’t take to being relegated to a memory bank, inside a strange, new body. Some souls, Belle thought, would much rather have passed on. The ARTISTS with those souls eventually lost them. Always. They became something much different than the loved-one that friends and family had been so desperate to replace.

Failed ARTISTs could never leave the district.

But Belle still loved being with them, at Yellow, helping them when they would allow her. Some wouldn’t let her near, sometimes because they hated natural humans and sometimes because they felt her presence implied their weakness. All ARTISTs had their feelings and their reasons; a little bit of wiring and a little bit of software didn’t change any of that. It hurt, some, when ARTISTs snubbed her, fine, but Belle didn’t mind. Wounded cats did the same thing.

Sometimes wounded cats died. So did ARTISTS.

Every so often workers from the Greens filed in to take away the empty bodies of failed ARTISTs Belle had spent the day before chasing around Yellow. Quests to get him to join in with the music module or to get her to sit in with the crafts club were separated from sterile white masks and the terms ‘offline’ and ‘such a shame’ and ‘scrap’ by just a few hours. Belle didn’t let herself cry.

Maybe the nurses would cry.

The teachers would clean out the deceased’s files.

The Yellow behavioral development researchers would stand outside and watch the smoke rise.

Belle’s rituals were, in her mind, simpler. For every old friend who passed away in Yellow, because every ARTIST she spent time with became a friend ( _and because friends **passed away**. They didn’t terminate, or go offline, or fail_ ), she was determined to make a new one. If she already knew everyone in Yellow at the time she would make another friend on the outside. Sometimes she would go straight from work to a bar, wouldn’t leave until she had a new contact code and a new person to share a hobby with.

Doors closed, windows opened, and life continued.

The soft synthetic lights just past the verification room made it difficult to think about death. They made it difficult to even think about the rest of the city, and in the mornings Belle didn’t want either on her mind anyway. Inside Yellow everything was warm.

“Good morning, Dr. Vargas!”

Dr. Vargas was a funny man, always smiling and teaching the ARTISTs why to smile, even though Belle suspected he wasn’t supposed to be away from the Greens as often as he was. Instead he spent much of his time in the various rooms of Yellow, playing with the child ARTISTs and running away from his colleague, Dr. Beilschmidt. Belle always greeted Dr. Vargas in the mornings, and Dr. Vargas always tried to bribe a kiss from her in return.

“Belle! If I ask Luise to pay you another three Jewels per hour, will you call me Feli? Felice? Feliciano Vargas, the love of my life?” He pulled off his white coat and hung it on a peg by the door as Belle took her apron off of a hanger two pegs down, “You make me sound like an _old man_ , ve, it’s heartbreaking so early in the day!”

She giggled. She couldn’t help but giggle around Feliciano Vargas. “But _Doctor_ , what will Dr. Beilschmidt say if she finds out you’re promising me money again?”

“She’ll ask how hard you slapped me when I asked to sleep with you,” he sighed, “and she won’t even be jealous when she says it or anything!”

And there it was. Belle was surprised the romance between the Doctors Vargas and Beilschmidt wasn’t actually a romance yet, because if there was one thing Feliciano Vargas wasn’t, it was shy about his affections.

“But you’ll give me a kiss, won’t you Belle?”

Or maybe that was the very same reason Luise stayed away. Feliciano was free with his affection for everyone. “Not today!”

“But tomorrow?”

She had been replying “Tomorrow!” for ten years: ever since Feliciano had hired her. He had been a little frantic at the time, understandably, and she had spent three weeks wondering where he’d found her contact passcode. But he had needed her then, a lot, and even his weak-hearted passes were cute in their own way.

A door near the end of the hallway opened and shut. “What is tomorrow?”

Belle half expected Dr. Beilschmidt to appear near the rack of coats and aprons, frowning, arms weighed down with patient checklists and forms to be filled out in triplicate. Dr. Luise Beilschmidt was kinder than she seemed, but she wasn’t much nicer, and Belle always felt a strange tingle in the back of her neck when Dr. Beilschmidt was near. Feliciano’s odd ideas of courtship undoubtedly did not help Belle’s sense of comfort around Dr. Beilschmidt.

But the person—the figure at the door wasn’t a doctor. He was an ARTIST.

“Kiku!”

With a full-bodied wave, Feliciano skipped across the room. Belle followed at a slightly subdued pace, only slightly, because even though no one could hope to match Feliciano’s enthusiasm, Kiku would be leaving shortly. He had completed all forty-nine of the modules relevant to assimilating into outside life in Schengen. He had passed all of his memory tests flawlessly. Kiku was the most perfect ARTIST Belle had ever encountered.

And even though she had read all of Honda Kiku’s files, information and records accounting for the time from his childhood in faraway ACD to his accident in Schengen, Belle couldn’t read him at all. It was almost as refreshing as it was frustrating, and she tried to guess what he was thinking on a regular basis. Sometimes she was even right.

“Doctor Vargas,” Kiku tipped his head, “and Miss Belle. I am pleased to see you this morning.”

He had on a three piece suit, grey with light stripes. It flattered his figure but even so he looked uncomfortable wearing it. Not for the first time, because a timeline in passcodes and education records could never encompass an entire soul, Belle wondered just who Kiku had truly been in his past life. Not that it mattered at this point, when he was about to go out into the world. In truth, Belle would probably never see Kiku again. Not from any lack of trying, but because the ARTISTs who left Yellow in tailored suits and fancy gowns were rarely allowed to acknowledge what they really were. It would be, ‘yes, Kiku had an accident but he’s fine now. Would you care for more wine?’ Never, ‘Kiku died in a car crash and then we paid a lot of money to bring him back to life and now he’s at a jazz concert with his ex-attendant…tea?’

Belle slowed and threw her arms around Kiku. How could she not? “Is this really your last day here, Kiku? I remember when you first, well, it’s been so long. I can’t believe it!”

Kiku took her embrace with grace. The corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly into a smile, and Belle knew she would miss him.

Someone coughed sharply. “If you don’t let go of him then it won’t be.”

From somewhere behind Belle and Kiku, Feliciano stepped away to greet the new voice. “Vash? Ve, I thought you weren’t coming in until next month—”

Belle whirled with a shout. “You!” She could apologize to Kiku later, if she remembered, because, “Vash Zwingli, how _dare_ you?!”

Just inside the verification room door, his old work boots still tied to his feet and his obnoxious threadbare coat still hanging from his stupid scrawny frame, Vash Zwingli shuddered. To his credit he did not falter. He would never be able to recover if Belle saw him falter, because she tended to exploit weaknesses like those and Vash wasn’t about to surrender on the point he was fairly certain she was shouting about. He had done nothing wrong. Nothing at all. He’d even _said_ the words ‘Happy Birthday’ the last time he had seen her… what more did she want from him?

“I have work to do.” He tried to grab his cleansuit in one arm while balancing his access card and toolbox in the other, and he would have been able to manage if Belle hadn’t started smiling. The worst thing was when she switched from rage to laughter in a heartbeat. It never boded anything well for him.

“Oh do you?” There was that smile. “Are you sure?”

Was this a trick? Vash didn’t like tricks. Belle _knew_ Vash didn’t like tricks. It had to be a trick. “I am doing diagnostic tests on Honda,” the access card slid down the length of Vash’s toolbox and clattered to the floor. He didn’t curse, not in front of the doctor ( _who wouldn’t care_ ), not in front of Belle ( _who would find it funny_ ), not in front of the ARTIST standing awkwardly in the corner ( _who knew how he would find it_ ), but it was close. Vash knelt to the ground to retrieve his card, brushing away Dr. Vargas’s attempts to assist him. “We can speak at another time.”

If the world had been kind they would have. If the world had been kind, then Dr. Beilschmidt would have chosen that moment to enter the room and sweep Dr. Vargas away. Or Dr. Vargas would have had the sense to mind his own business and let Vash get on with the diagnostics on Honda which Bonnefoy had specifically requested. If there was one thing Vash had known since an early age, however, it was that his world was a cruel one.

“Ve…” Vargas looked back and forth between Vash and Belle, and Vash could see the rusty gears turning under his ridiculous mop of hair. “Kiku! I have a few more tests for you to do before your sister picks you up. I’m sorry Vash,” he didn’t look it, “but could you wait for a while? In _fact_ , ve… why don’t you catch up with Belle!” He winked. Vash grimaced. “Belle always says very nice things about you, she…”

The gears clicked on in the silence of the room.

“She says you’re really sexy!”

Before Vash could wring Vargas’s neck, or pretend none of the past five minutes had happened and get the damn requested diagnostics finally underway, the intercom crackled to life and a sharp voice echoed throughout the warehouse. “Feliciano!” The disembodied voice of Luise Beilschmidt finally cleared her absent throat. “You are not on your break, whatever your head has foolishly decided. Report to Green 01 immediately! Thank you!”

If Vash didn’t know any better he would have accused Vargas of timing the diversion. Perhaps he should anyway. Dr. Beilschmidt tended to seek Vargas out if she had not heard from or about him for longer than twenty minutes, and he could very well have been keeping track of the time he had been gone. That annoyance.

“That was my Luise ve, and doesn’t she sound angry okay Kiku let’s go visit Luise and tell her nice things so she won’t shout at me for not finishing my reports even though I don’t know why they’re important anyway because Francis already said he doesn’t read any of them and have a nice day Belle and give a great big kiss to Vash for me because his face is a little scary right now and I bet that would make him feel better and ve, let’s go!”

_That annoyance._

According to the rest of the world, Feliciano Vargas, inventor of the Artificially Reconstructed Time-Influenced Succedaneous Technosapien technology ( _“Feliciano. Please don’t tell me you chose a name so ridiculous in the pursuit of an acronym!” “ _Doctor_ Feliciano.… and yes, ve, but don’t tell.”_ ), was a genius. According to Vash he needed to have six pounds of sense drummed into his flighty head. Vash knew who the correct party was.

“Don’t listen to Feliciano.”

“When have I ever listened to him?”

“True,” Belle laughed, stilted, “but you know how it goes. There’s a first—”

He cut her off, wrinkling his nose unconsciously, and draped his cleansuit over his left shoulder. “Not for me.”

That would have been that with anyone else, but not with Belle, so Vash was completely prepared for the way she tugged on his arm as he tried to pass her in the hallway. He was completely prepared. Completely. He only jumped a little when she pressed a kiss to the side of his face, which was only red out of annoyance. “You know,” he tried to extract his arm from her grasp, and in doing so dropped his access card again, “just because he tells you to do ridiculous things doesn’t mean you have to carry them out.”

“Oh, I know.” She let him go. “But it makes being around you more fun; you’re really a killjoy, you know?”

Vash knew. It was a point of pride. “I don’t have time for this.”

“Of course you do! You’ve got all the time in the world, Zwingli. _You_ don’t have the ARTIST you need,” Belle bent at the waist before Vash could process what she was trying to do, “and if Feliciano takes his time like he always does when he’s trying to set you up with someone, you won’t get him back for a week!” She popped back up with a laugh, and with Vash’s card in tow, because Feliciano’s actions were always amusing to her. Anyone’s effort to get Vash to spend time with someone he wasn’t being paid to be around was amusing to Belle.

It certainly wasn’t amusing to Vash.

Vash Zwingli considered himself a simple man, the only man who saw sense in a sea of overly-whimsical fools. At the age of eight he had walked out of Schengen’s Orphanage 4-West with a small sack of belongings and a simmering grudge against anyone who tried to force him to do anything he didn’t want to do. At the age of nine, he had slept in the park behind the Edelstein estate during the day, and during the night had helped change the world. But no matter how much of a technological genius he was, no matter what percentage of the revolutionary JewelTech ( _instrumental in the move from the Balanced Time Unit to the Jewel Standard as Schengen’s official currency_ ) he had developed by himself in the Edelstein labs, Vash Zwingli was still a scowling little boy, alone. Untalkative and cold, he had parted ways with the Edelstein research organization ( _and family_ ) two days before the engagement party of their heiress.

All orphans were wards of the state, technically, but runaways from the orphanages were common, and Vash knew better than to think that Schengen saw him as a child to be cared for. At first, after leaving the Edelsteins, he tried to support himself. His attempts to find contract work would have been laughable if he had been inclined to laugh at the time. By the age of eleven he had acquiesced to a room in public apartments and a small position in Schengen’s central administration offices, given to him in the hopes that after a few horrible years of mind-numbing paperwork his temperament would settle and he would agree to advanced schooling and an Edelstein paycheck.

By thirteen he had created an SI in his spare time and held twenty-seven patents, twenty-five of which Schengen’s central administration directly took all revenue from _in trust_ , until he became a legal adult. In his office, Vash Zwingli filled out forms, thought, and waited.

At sixteen he met Belle.

At the time, Vash had been newly shunted into the legal offices, because of someone’s hope that he would learn every field and policy by osmosis. Instead, he authorized divorce forms.

Day in.

And day out.

Each new day was the same whirlwind of faces colder than his that shattered and shifted into bright masks of rage at a moment’s notice. Each new day set Vash’s faith in humanity one notch lower than his faith in technology: until the day he met Belle.

“Fernandez and…” Vash blinked at the form in front of him, and then at the door to his left. The buzz of traffic filled the office, empty of any officials besides himself. The rest of them had been scattered because of some high-profile court case, and now Vash was the only one left to deal with, “Edelstein. You may enter.”

The door creaked open. An unfamiliar boy and a very familiar girl strolled past it, both wearing expensive clothing and calm expressions. Behind them came a young maid, dressed in green, and an even younger maid in yellow. The yellow maid held the hand of a red-faced little boy. It was the most color the office had seen since the day Vash had transferred ( _synonymous with the day he had removed the non-regulation motivational posters from the walls_ ).

The oldest person in the room had to be the green maid, and she couldn’t be a day past twenty.

Vash took a new pen from a drawer to his right, and got on with it. Perhaps he had questions, but this wasn’t the time for them. “Antonio Fernandez Carriedo?”

The boy stepped forward. He turned his head when the child holding the yellow maid’s hand began to sniffle, but only put a finger to his lips before giving Vash his full attention. “That’s me.” Fernandez signed and dated where Vash indicated he should. Under the section titled ‘Grounds for Divorce’ he ignored all of the easily-divided check boxes and began to scribble a small paragraph. “This is going to take a little while, sorry,” he didn’t look it, “but I want them to know the truth when they look this up, and none of the choices were really right. They said we had to get married,” the green maid shifted, “but they didn’t say we had to _stay_ married.”

It wasn’t Vash’s place to say anything. So he didn’t. He had already changed the divorce registry code to allow for write-ins and he would have to see their reasons when he entered them later. He didn’t want to see them now.

Fernandez finished writing with a flourish. He turned to pass off the pen before hesitating. “Do you have to call her name now, or…” he let his question trail.

Vash pursed his lips, and Amalia Theresa Edelstein stepped forward when her name was called. She took the pen from her husband quickly and signed him away just as fast. Vash nodded at her. She wished him a good day, civilly, and stepped back when she had finished, and Vash flipped through their paperwork. It was in order and it was complete. Usually, at this time, someone else would arbiter the disputes for any shared property and Vash could get on with making copies of the forms and wishing he could have his own office. This time, without looking at Amalia, he did the divisions on his own.

Most of Fernandez’s and Amalia’s possessions had been acquired before their marriage, and had been protected. Even so, their shared accounts, which had been active for just over a year, made them the richest teenagers Vash had ever heard of, and neither batted an eyelash when he snipped their life together down the middle and distributed half to either side. Then he came to the matter of the child. He could not snip a child, but the law of the Zone said that custody should be shared, and the law of Schengen said that the child would live with the mother, so, “and you, Amalia Theresa Edelstein, will take custody of—”

“You are mistaken.”

Vash frowned. He had so many questions, and the child was crying, and Fernandez was rushing to the back of the room to quiet him, and arbiters were _not_ to be interrupted. “Miss Edelstein,” his tone was clipped, “you will remain silent, and you will take the child until he is fifteen, at which point he may decide whether he wishes to live full-time with his father.”

She matched his formality effortlessly. “I shall not.”

Vash remembered her crying in the rain, dress torn and expression pitiful. “ _Miss Edelstein._ ”

“There will be no further discussion.” Amalia raised her head. “I will not take him.”

Another voice chimed in from the back of the room. The young maid in yellow had her hands on her hips and a carefree smile that belied her defiant outburst. “You know, you should check your paperwork before getting into arguments. And his name’s _Lovino_.”

The child in question muttered furious words incomprehensible to Vash, and beat his arms against Fernandez’s back. Fernandez held the child close, rocking him softly while whispering something in his ear to quiet him. Amalia watched them from a distance, body turned half-away. It was… it was not how it should have been. The strangeness did not excuse the maid’s behavior, though, and Vash reprimanded her as he scanned Amalia’s and Fernandez’s records. “You will be silent in these proceedings, Miss.”

The maid bristled. “You can’t just tell me to be quiet when you make a mistake like that!”

“The law of Schengen—”

“The law says Lovino should stay with his father,” the green maid tried unsuccessfully to drag the yellow maid from the room. Instead the yellow maid marched up to the front of it and scowled directly in Vash’s face. If he had been paying more attention to her instead of the more important matters at hand, he would have noticed she was mimicking his own expression. “And Antonio’s as good as. So, no problems, and we can all go!”

“The _law_ argues in the case of the,” Vash’s eye stopped at a line three-quarters of the way down the second page of Fernandez’s record. So the child had been adopted. Before the marriage. Vash grit his teeth together. “Excuse me… I… appear to have been mistaken.”

“You were.”

“Belle get _down_ from there—!”

“If there is nothing more you require from me, I will take my leave. The papers may be forwarded to my family estate.”

“…Lovi, shhhh, big boys don’t pull their papa’s hai—ahh!”

“I hate you!”

At sixteen, technological prodigy Vash Zwingli authorized the amicable divorce between sixteen-year-old Antonio Fernandez Carriedo, heir to the Grand Transfer Central transportation corporation, and fifteen-year-old Amalia Theresa Edelstein, heiress to the Edelstein family’s JewelTech Industries. At sixteen, technological prodigy Vash Zwingli quit his horrible desk job after the Bonnefoy Institute offered him his own office and access to state of the art SI development systems.

At sixteen, technological prodigy Vash Zwingli met Belle Mertens, and from over a desk decided he would be content if he never had to speak with such an infuriating person again.

Not even ten years later she had to go and become his best friend. That fact was as far from amusing to Vash as possible, second only to the fact that the very faults that made Belle so difficult to be around were the main reasons why he was, now, more than ten years later, completely in love with her.

He wasn’t amused by that either.

“Vash? I know my kisses are magical, but did I break you?”

He snatched his access card back from her hand with barely a grumble, and tried to escape, again, through the door at the end of the hallway. Belle wouldn’t follow him into the cleansuit rooms anymore. Vash could have his peace there.

“Hey!”

His escape failed. Again.

“Why didn’t you come to my birthday party, Vash Zwingli?” Belle cocked her head to the side. “I thought you loved me Vaaaashhhh.”

She could be such a child sometimes. And yet, “I do.”

“W-well,” she huffed, because perhaps Vash had never acknowledged it outright before, “of course you love me. Everyone loves me.” Belle liked being the kind of person that everyone loved. She wore the affection well. “But everyone else came to my birthday party last week and you _didn’t_. What kind of love is that?”

Ahead of her Vash stowed his access card in his pocket and tightened his grip on his toolbox. Belle could tell that he wanted to leave the conversation ( _if his two breaks for freedom weren’t obvious enough_ ), but he wasn’t getting out of this so easily. Something was different in the air today.

“A patient one.”

A patient…? “What’s that supposed to mean? _I_ ’m the patient one; you’re horrible to get along with.”

“You sound even more ridiculous than Vargas now.”

This was a little better. This was familiar. “Says you!”

Arguing was their favorite sport. “Yes, I did _just_ say that, Belle.”

“Well, _Vash_ , I just said that you’ve got no right to call yourself patient when I’m the one who brings all the love and tenderness into our friendship, only to get shut down at every turn by your cold, mean, Vash-ness.”

“You’re not the only one.” Belle frowned. Usually by now they would be bickering full-speed, but Vash was… he was backing down? “And what does it matter that I didn’t go to the party? I made sure you got home afterwards. That should be more important to you.”

“Yes, well…” Belle grabbed him by the shoulders. To her surprise, he let her. “You know I’m not really mad, don’t you? …Vash? Is everything all right?”

“I do love you.”

Belle gulped. Vash’s face was serious. It was always serious, true, but this serious was a different serious. This serious was ‘arbiter of the law of Schengen’ serious, ‘meet my SI her name is LIECHTENSTEIN’ serious, ‘I am _never_ going dancing with you again’ serious. This was one of Vash’s eternal promises serious, and Belle felt a blush creep its way up the back of her neck. She smoothed down wrinkles that weren’t there on the front of her yellow dress. Friends didn’t say ‘I love you’ like that. Lovers said ‘I love you’ like that, preferably over breakfast after ten years together, as a calm matter of fact and not a bursting revelation in a sterile hallway decked with coats and caps. “Um.” For once, Belle had nothing to say. “I… I mean. I love you too, Vash, you’re the best!” She winced as she slapped him on the back.

“You idiot. That’s not what I mean and you know it.” He turned, not defeated, just— patient. “This was… I have work to do.”

This time he made it to the door.

“Wait.”

He waited.

Belle wet her lips and hoped this didn’t change too much. “You’re supposed to kiss a girl when you tell her you love her. I would’ve thought Bonnefoy would’ve taught you that.”

Vash set down his toolbox as Belle strode towards him, and they met in the center of the hallway, two forces moving in opposite directions. When they kissed, Belle tasted color, bright, and clear and true.

**Author's Note:**

> World building is the most fun an author can have without taking— I mean. World building is so much fun that I couldn’t stop this one at just this story. There will probably be others, eventually. At some point. Um.
> 
> Moving on!
> 
> I hope you did like this, [glory_of_hera](http://glory-of-hera.livejournal.com/)!
> 
>  **Vash’s Zinger Epilogue:** “And I would have thought Vargas would have taught you how to kiss properly.”
> 
>  **Things to note:** [Schengen ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area)// [The Jewel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule) //[ Grand Transfer Central ( _GTC_ )](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Telescopio_Canarias) // [Balanced Time Unit ( _BTU_ )](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_thermal_unit) // [Synthetic Intelligence ( _SI_ )](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix) // [ACD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Cooperation_Dialogue)
> 
> Succedaneous = _being, or employed as, a substitute for another_. When I was trying to come up with a good acronym, ARTIST suited my purposes for something else in the story, but I soon realized that getting that ‘s’ is a real bitch. Thus, Luise asking Feliciano why the hell he’s got such an awkward name in that aside up there is me poking fun at myself. I also had fun looking up suitable ‘s’ words.
> 
> Future plans: I’ve got a few other stories in this universe that I want to get to eventually, focusing on different parts of the cast. Those will have various pairings and more silly naming jokes and Significantly Capitalized Words. One of them will have spamano, and I’m looking forward to it. Usually I avoid the bridge between Spain+minimano times and adult!Romano/Spain times, so this will be a new exploration for me because I’ve obviously established Spain’s dad figurehood here ( _I made Spain get him before the marriage so he could be Entirely Spain’s Problem_ ). Of course, there will be plot twists and angst to go along because I’m fun like that. There might also be Romano And Spain Ultimately Not Ending Up Together times, but I’m not sure on how I want it to play out yet.


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